19 Motion Sickness Remedies

The French call seasickness mal de mer, and even the most seasoned sailors can suffer from it. When traveling by air, it’s called airsickness. On land, it’s car sickness. At amusement parks, it’s ride sickness. At least one visitor a day turns green on Disney World’s Space Mountain or the Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster. Regardless of what you call it, it’s all the same thing: that queasy, uneasy feeling collectively known as motion sickness.

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Your body relies on several systems to keep you operating properly when you’re in motion, says Tim Hain, MD. These include structures in your inner ears; your eyes; so-called somatosensors around your body that take in information such as touch; and an internal mental sense of motion, in which your mind anticipates the motions that you’ll soon be making. “In general, when a mismatch occurs between one or more of these, there’s potential for motion sickness,” Hain says. For example, if you’re in the backseat of a car reading a book as you travel over bumpy, curvy roads, your inner ears are reporting that you’re bouncing all around, but your eyes are fixed on the book in front of you. This is a common recipe for motion sickness.

Although not everyone gets motion sickness, the signals are pretty clear when it does occur. Dizziness. Sweating. Pale skin and feelings of nausea. If things don’t improve, you throw up. Once you feel the symptoms coming on, motion sickness can be very difficult to stop, especially if you’ve reached your particular point of no return—usually once nausea sets in. But the following motion sickness remedies can help nurse the symptoms, perhaps even cutting them short. Better yet, they may keep them from starting in the first place the next time you’re bobbing and rolling, rolling and bobbing along on a choppy sea’s waves.

Leave Nursing The Sick To Someone Else

It’s a common occurrence. You’re on a fishing boat. Everything’s going along fine until someone gets sick. You watch in sympathy, maybe even offer a comforting shoulder. Before long, you’re the next body down. Then another hits the deck. It’s the domino theory in action. As cruel as it may sound, do your best to ignore others who are sick, says Konrad. Otherwise, you’re liable to end up in the same proverbial boat.

Avoid Bad Odors

Bad odors such as engine fumes, the dead fish on ice in the back of the boat, or the airline food passing by on the flight attendant’s cart can contribute to nausea, says Konrad. Aim your nose elsewhere.

Don't Smoke

If you’re a smoker, you may think that lighting up can calm you, deterring motion sickness. Wrong. Cigarette smoke contributes to impending nausea, says Konrad. If you’re a nonsmoker, you should hightail it to the nonsmoking section when you feel queasiness coming on.

Travel At Night

Your chances of getting sick diminish when you travel at night because you can’t see the motion as well as you can during daylight, says Roderic W. Gillilan, OD.

Think Before You Drink

“Too much alcohol can interfere with the way the brain handles information about the environment, setting off motion sickness symptoms,” says Konrad. What’s more, alcohol can dissolve into the fluids in your inner ear, which can send your head spinning, he says. Drink in moderation, if at all, during plane and ship travel.

Eat Before You Go

Oftentimes people won’t eat before they begin an activity that’s likely to cause motion sickness, says Max Levine, PhD. This seems reasonable, but it’s not a good idea. “Having an empty stomach is one of the worst things you can do. It seems that if you get your stomach into its normal rhythm of contraction, it’s more likely to stay that way than if it’s sitting there with nothing to do in the first place.” In one of Levine’s studies, participants sat with their head inside a rotating drum painted with black and white stripes for several minutes, which, not surprisingly, can induce nausea. Those who drank a high-protein shake first reported fewer symptoms than those who’d eaten nothing, and measurements of their stomach activity found less excess churning. So eat a snack containing protein before you head off on your potentially stomach-churning activity. Just make sure it’s low in fat—a high-fat food such as a cheeseburger wouldn’t help.

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Get Enough Sleep

“Your chance of getting motion sickness increases with fatigue,” says Gillilan. So be sure to get your usual quota of sleep before taking off on a trip. If you’re a passenger in a car or plane, catching a few Zzzs while en route can help, too, if only to temporarily ward off potentially sickening stimuli. (Here's how much sleep you need each night.)

Get Behind The Wheel

Being in control of your situation—or even feeling like you’re in control—can help reduce nausea, Levine says. In other research involving the striped rotating nausea machine, when participants were given a button to push that they thought controlled the rotation, they had less-severe symptoms, even though they were exposed to as much spinning as the people without the button. So when you’re traveling, you may be less likely to feel sick if you’re the driver rather than the passenger. It’s also a good idea to stick with familiar routes so you can get to your destination more effectively and better anticipate the types of movements that are coming up, Hain says.

Get Caught Up On Your Reading Another Time

Obviously, if reading in a moving vehicle tends to trigger motion sickness, save your reading material for later. Sure, skimming the pages may make the time go by faster, but the nausea and vomiting that ensues will make the trip feel much longer. If you absolutely must read, there are ways to do it without getting sick, says Gillilan. Among them: Slouch in the seat and hold the reading material close to eye level. “It’s not the reading itself that makes you sick,” he says, “but the angle at which you’re doing it. When you look down while traveling in a car, the visible motion from the side windows strikes the eyes at an unusual angle, and that triggers the symptoms. This method brings your eyes into the same position as if you were looking down the road.” Hold your hands next to your temples to block out the action, or turn your back to the window nearest you.

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Scan The Horizon

In a car, move up to the front seat and focus on the road ahead or the horizon. This can help bring signals from your body and your eyes into balance. The same goes for travel on a ship or boat: Don’t stare down at the water, where you’ll see the craft rise and fall and the waves crash around you. Instead, fix your eyes on a point on the horizon, preferably an unmoving object like the shoreline.

Wear Accupressure Wristbands

Sold in many marine and travel shops, these lightweight wristbands have a plastic button that is supposed to be worn over what Eastern doctors call the Nei-Kuan acupressure point inside each wrist. Pressing the button for a few minutes should protect you against nausea.

Get Over-The-Counter Relief

Nonprescription remedies such as Dramamine and Bonine can be helpful, but you need to take them before you get sick, Hain says. If you’re susceptible to motion sickness, take the remedy 30 minutes before you start moving. Also, beware that these medications cause drowsiness, so they may not be a good choice if you need to be alert.

Remember, Time Heals All Wounds

This includes motion sickness. You may feel like you’re going to die, but motion sickness doesn’t kill. Your body should eventually adjust to the environment in a ship or boat—although it might take a few days. So be patient. Things will get better.

Motion Sickness Kitchen Cures

Folk remedies for motion sickness have probably been around since before the first buggy ride. Here are some that are worth trying.

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Ginger: Although the remedy is tried and true, ginger passed scientific scrutiny when an experiment showed that two powdered gingerroot capsules were more effective than a dose of Dramamine in preventing motion sickness.

Olives and Lemons: Motion sickness causes you to produce excess saliva, which can make you nauseated, some doctors say. Olives produce chemicals called tannins, which make your mouth dry. Hence, the theory goes, eating a couple of olives at the first hint of nausea can help diminish it, as can sucking on a mouth-puckering lemon.

Soda Crackers: They won’t stop salivation, but dry soda crackers may help absorb the excess fluid when it reaches your stomach. Their “secret ingredients” are bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar.

A Space-Age Motion Sickness Cure That Goes to Extremes

“...Four, three, two, one—liftoff!” With an earth-shaking roar, white-hot jets propel Spacelab 3 and its four-member crew into the stratosphere, where it turns its back on a world still tremulously shivering. But the folks in ground control aren’t the only ones shaken up by the blast. A mere 7 minutes into the flight, one of the crew members has his first “vomiting episode,” an incident that is rerun numerous times during the mission. Being motion sick in space is a serious problem for astronauts.

“At any one time, the whole crew could be incapacitated,” says Patricia Cowings, PhD. “Potentially, it could be disastrous. Throwing up while wearing a helmet could be fatal.” And there’s no easy solution, since motion sickness medications can have dangerous side effects. But new horizons are opening up, thanks to a biofeedback training program. For decades, Cowings and her colleagues have been making people sick in order to help astronauts feel better. “Essentially, our routine involves bringing a person up to our lab and making him throw up,” says Cowings, known to her colleagues as the “Baroness of Barf.” A devious device aids this process: a chair that rotates while moving volunteers’ heads at various angles, a process that throws off the inner ear’s sense of balance in a few minutes. “It works on virtually everyone,” she says. While rotating, the subject is monitored for physiological responses such as heart rate, breathing rate, sweating, and muscle contractions. “No two people have exactly the same response,” Cowings says. “Motion sickness is actually a kind of fingerprint that’s unique to each person.” Once the fingerprint is revealed, it’s a map for each person to learn to control his particular responses through a combination of deep relaxation and exercise of muscles—muscles we don’t realize we can exercise, like those in blood vessels.

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If you can learn to successfully control your early responses, you may prevent more violent ones from coming up. The success rate is so great that Cowings and her colleagues patented the technique. “About 60% can completely eliminate their symptoms when we retest them in the chair. Another 25% can significantly decrease their responses. And the training remains effective for up to 3 years,” she says. The results are promising enough to suggest that an actual cure for motion sickness is on the horizon, says Cowings.

Panel Of Advisors

Patricia Cowings, PhD, is the principal investigator of psychophysiological research laboratories at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. She's also professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Roderic W. Gillilan, OD, is a retired optometrist in Eugene, Oregon, where he still works in education regarding motion sickness.

Tim Hain, MD, is a professor of neurology, otolaryngology, and physical therapy-human movement science at the Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago.

Horst Konrad, MD, is a professor of otolaryngology at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield.

Max Levine, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at Siena College in Loudonville, New York, where he focuses on mind-body issues related to nausea.

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